Scepticism about global warming, politics and other things

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The Dysfunctional EPA

From the Animas River Spill to the Porn loving employee and the fraudulent (and incarcerated) Climate Change Expert (John C. Beale) who claimed he was working in Pakistan for the CIA so he could avoid his daytime job at the EPA, this agency is worthless. The EPA failed miserably at its primary job in regards to Flint but it is on top of pretty colored lights to tell office workers that they using too much water and energy in the restroom. (To the tune of $300,000.)

A Judge has ruled the EPA lied about transparency and tells the agency to halt discrimination against conservative groups and their requests for information. (From the link) Conservatives produced a 2013 study finding that their requests for fee waivers under open-records requests were denied about 90 percent of the time, while liberal interest groups’ fee-waiver requests were approved 90 percent of the time. The Blaze has a report calling the EPA the most SECRETIVE AGENCY. From that report: Critics say the agency is blatantly violating the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, and the Federal Records Act, or FRA. FOIA requires that in most cases, the government provide documents to the public upon request. This law can’t work without the FRA, which requires government documents be archived properly.

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In September (2015), a federal judge admonished the EPA for destroying text messages from Gina McCarthy, who had replaced Jackson as agency chief the previous year. The messages were sent and received on McCarthy’s government-issued phone to other EPA staff.

Now, GOP staffers have released a 70-page report showing how federal agencies just can’t seem to get their story straight on what happened at Gold King Mine (Animas River) last year. The report claims EPA and the Interior Department have offered “shifting accounts of the events leading up to the spill and contain numerous errors, omissions, and inconsistencies, some of which are not attributable to error or incompetence alone.”

There are those who have said the EPA’s actions were done in order to force the area onto the Superfund List. Here is a PDF of the letter sent to the Colorado Governor. And now they have appointed a Superfund manager.

On top of everything else, Obama is threatening to veto legislation which requires the EPA to make public any scientific data used to justify regulations.

Somewhere, once upon a time, it was a given that a government agency was supposed to do the best work it could on behalf of the TAXPAYERS. Not any more.

(Right click to enlarge)

Lavernae is my term for that region where Laverna, the Roman Goddess of Thieves, con men and charlatans rules over thieves, pickpockets, shopkeepers or dealers, plagiarists, rascals, and the underworld, among others. In this realm:

“O Goddess Laverna!
Give me the art of cheating and deceiving,
Of making men believe that I am just,
Holy, and innocent! extend all darkness
And deep obscurity o’er my misdeeds!”

Horace (Epist. 16, lib. I)

The EPA fits right in. In fact the above should be engraved over the main door to the agency.